Warcraft Radio's Interview with Ion Hazzikostas on the Ny'alotha World First Race and Beyond

Live Опубликовано 12.02.2020 в 12:41 Squishei

Full Interview

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Gareth Cales Twitter

HighlightsRace to World First General

Both Method and Limit have someone they can contact at Blizzard to report issues. Over the course of the weekend, and even during the Super Bowl, there were people working on and testing hotfixes to resolve some issues.

Regarding the Ra-den "Clever Use of Game Mechanics", they do unfortunately need to sleep and they have a different set of standards once a boss has been defeated.

Regarding the Ra-den Pre-Immunity strategy used by Limit, they are bugs/oversights. Immunities are supposed to be powerful, but when an immunity removes a mechanic they don't want the strategy going forward to be stacking immunities.

Because the Race is livestreamed now, any issue or bug is magnified in ways that they haven't seen in the past and it's causing them to reflect. It does look embarrassing to have bugs with so many people watching and historically Mythic end bosses haven't been tested and polished, it just hasn't had a spotlight on it.

A simultaneous release for all regions is unlikely. A tournament realm is unlikely as well.

The term Esports is tricky. The Race is an organic community event and it isn't structure to be a perfect equal race with time zones and patches being a factor. It's a great community event and they love it and want to support it but Esports is a tricky label to apply because it lacks the structure, template and rules that are standardized.

N'Zoth the Corruptor Bugs

Limit found that instead of going to the Heart Forge, they could just heal through the pulsing raid damage. Normally, what Blizzard imagines the final strategy will be is different from first kills, but when it involves skipping a phase entirely that's when they needed to step in.

With the Thought Harvester change, Limit was sending in feedback that it was hard to control where the Thought Harvesters casted. Because of this, Blizzard rolled out a first hotfix that allowed them to cast while moving which made the current strategy harder. This was quickly rolled back and Blizzard went back to the drawing board and came up with a better solution: Thought Harvesters always spawn on tanks. One of the things they want to avoid is excessive randomness.

Part of the mystery of doing progress on these bosses is you don't know exactly how these fights work. As explained on Twitter and other places, the 25% shield and 2nd Heart Phase was a code bug that essentially turned an OR condition, into an AND.

Carapace of N'Zoth

Carapace of N'Zoth was a little undertuned. The damage requirement in Phase 1 was probably a little low as they got to future phases relatively quickly.

The Carapace of N'Zoth bug was a chance to happen, probably sub 1/1000 thing. When a sanity draining event applies to a player, there was a chance based on a fraction of a second timing, that it could basically double count.

In the past, they've never communicated publicly about these kinds of hotfixes because it only affected these 20 or 40 people in the entire World. Now, with the streams, this change things.

Corruption

Overall they've happy with how corruption is playing out. There were some tuning issues.

They are focused on the ratio of power to the points of corruption on the item.

Corruption is almost like a game of Tetris, and some of the lower tiers allow you to be more flexible with your corruption budget.

Corruption is an 8.3 system, but they're happy with how the experiment has played out and it's letting them explore a world without Warforging and Titanforging

The 21st Raider - The Coach

Watching it was very fascinating to watch as being there in person and able to call things with no delay likely made this possible in a way that wasn't possible in the past.

A common suggestion in the past was a spectator mode for raids and when thinking about it, they had to wonder if the right way to play the game was to have someone who didn't even participate in the encounter.

There's no question that your performance in some area suffers when you raid lead.

N'Zoth Death and Cinematics

There are definitely hints about where things are heading in the future future that people will hopefully look back on after Shadowlands

Regarding the N'Zoth payoff, they're satisfied with how it turned out. They've definitely heard feedback from the community - there's some element of "that was it".

A regret is how the cinematic with how the cinematic was viewed by most people. It was designed of you the character), of you the player) being the hero -- they're thinking back to criticism they've gotten in the past such as with Thrall and the Deathwing cinematic.

Shadowlands

Lot to talk about about Shadowlands in the very near future.

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